Recently, electronic equipment such as smart phones including a touch panel is being widely used. Such a touch panel technology needs not to display ‘a pointer’ on a display unlike electronic equipment such as typical computers that is controlled by a mouse. For control of electronic equipment, a user locates his/her finger on icons and touches them without locating a pointer (a cursor of a computer) on a certain location (e.g., program icon). The touch panel technology enables quick control of electronic equipment because it needs not to move a ‘pointer’ that is essential as a typical electronic control means.
However, since a user has to directly touch a display surface in spite of the above convenience of the touch panel technology, there is a limitation in that the touch panel technology could not be used for remote control. Accordingly, even electronic equipment using the touch panel technology has to depend on a device such as a typical remote controller.
A technology using an apparatus capable of generating a pointer on an exact point as a remote control apparatus for electronic equipment like the touch panel technology is disclosed in Korean Patent Publication No. 10-2010-0129629, published Dec. 9, 2010. The technology includes photographing the front surface of a display using two cameras and then generating a pointer on a point where the extension lines of the eye and finger of a user meet the display. However, the technology has an inconvenience in that a pointer is necessarily generated as a preliminary measure for control of electronic equipment (including a pointer controller) and then gestures of a user has to be compared with already-stored patterns for concrete operation control.
Also, there is a limitation in that a method of remotely controlling an electronic device by generating a pointer at a point where extending straight lines of an eye and a finger of a user meet a point on a display from the photographed image is necessarily limited to electronic devices including display units with a large screen (having a sufficiently large size for a user to confirm an operated icon even from a remote distance). For this, since the remote control is possible only from the front side of the electronic device, a user needs to be positioned at the front side of the electronic device to operate the electronic device. Furthermore, in a related art, since the electronic device is configured to be operated by a communication between the electronic device and a camera controller, the electronic device can be remotely operated only when the electronic device is fixedly located. Accordingly, the remotely controllable electronic devices are inevitably limited to immobile electronic devices.